Faire la Cuisine

Work has been a little slow of late, since I finished doing my background research and am now waiting to actually perform tests on patients with multiple sclerosis. I had a wonderful dinner yesterday though, with Melissa, Ian and Ian's older sister, Rachel, who is visiting him for 10 days. After work, I stopped by my apartment and then took the metro across town to meet up with Ian and Melissa. They had just come from the supermarket and we were about to make shrimp and pasta. They had decided to buy shrimp fresh and with the heads on and the messy sight didn't stop amusing us even as we finished up our dinner. Ian directed the efforts of cooking, and though if I had any experience cooking, I may have resented his simpistic instructions, I found them extremely comforting and helpful. We were also trying out the local recommended beer and the Lillean cheese which smelled pungently of stinky feet. We had two kitchens (Melissa's and Ian's) to cook, but unfortunately no table at which to eat, so we had a picnic on Melissa's floor. We schemed about how we could make friends with the French guys next door who had their door open, were playing French music, and amusing themselves by throwing balls at each others' heads before deciding we would start by asking them to take a picture of the four of us. That was all it took, as 10 minutes later, they came by our room again to ask us to join them for drinks. At this point, we were crowded around Ian in his kitchen; he did the dishes and we made ourselves useful by generously eating his chocolate nutella. We went next door to meet the French boys and Ian joined us soon after. We spoke very good Frenglish and had a great time, though unfortunately I had to leave early because the subway shut down at midnight. Ian walked me to the subway where I noticed 984,687,321 missed calls and texts from my adorable and extremely worried mother. After assuring her I had been neither abducted by aliens, nor kidnapped by French pirateers or something like that, I returned home and also found emails from Ian and Melissa telling me to call my mother, as they had just received emails from her as well. Note to all back home-I'm ok and i'm pretty much always ok, so stop worrying!. . . unless you really want to in which case I guess that's ok too. I love you guys. :-)